I really worry now that they've lost trust in Quinten Joyner after the second quarter fumble last week. He didn't touch the ball the rest of the game, so I asked Lincoln Riley about it today:
"Well, there's a fine line. There's a fine line. There's mistakes that you can live with in a game; there's some that are very detrimental. Ball-carriers, when you have the football, I mean there's not much room for error just because turnovers are so hindering on your chances to win. Obviously, that was a massive play in the game and certainly not blaming it all on Quinten -- there's many other plays in that game. But job No. 1 if you're a ball-carrier, you've got to finish the down with the [ball]. So Quinten's a good, young player. We're never going to certainly toss a guy away after one mistake, but they've got to show progress and they've got to show that, all right, I made this mistake once, it's not going to happen again. Because we tell our players all the time, there's no player that's good enough that you can live with excessive penalties or excessive turnovers. It doesn't matter how many good plays you make -- if you do either one of those things it can never equal out and you're always going to be in the negative and it's always going to hurt the team more than it helps the team. I believe Quinten will learn from it and grow, and we're going to push him -- we're going to work on the things from a fundamental standpoint and expect him to improve and be much better for us going forward."
"Well, there's a fine line. There's a fine line. There's mistakes that you can live with in a game; there's some that are very detrimental. Ball-carriers, when you have the football, I mean there's not much room for error just because turnovers are so hindering on your chances to win. Obviously, that was a massive play in the game and certainly not blaming it all on Quinten -- there's many other plays in that game. But job No. 1 if you're a ball-carrier, you've got to finish the down with the [ball]. So Quinten's a good, young player. We're never going to certainly toss a guy away after one mistake, but they've got to show progress and they've got to show that, all right, I made this mistake once, it's not going to happen again. Because we tell our players all the time, there's no player that's good enough that you can live with excessive penalties or excessive turnovers. It doesn't matter how many good plays you make -- if you do either one of those things it can never equal out and you're always going to be in the negative and it's always going to hurt the team more than it helps the team. I believe Quinten will learn from it and grow, and we're going to push him -- we're going to work on the things from a fundamental standpoint and expect him to improve and be much better for us going forward."
